Foreign Bodies
Reedy, Gerard
explored, the major time frame of the book, takes Angela from about age thirty-eight to age forty-three. She has been divorced for eight years, is a ~uc- cessful writer, and lives in Brooklyn with...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison lets Angela reveal few moral qualities which make him lovable...
...She also speculates that his beauty is a kind of analogy, for her, of the Incarnation of the Word...
...Their control was solid...
...Dump him, we shout...
...For Devi is generally a nasty piece of work: self-indulgent, careless of Angela's feelings, and cruel...
...I can't, I can't, she responds...
...Although much happens to Angela between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-three, she doesn't change...
...Devi's beauty is like a character trait," she writes, "Devi's beauty amounts to a kind of goodness...
...What is the se- cret of her past that makes her fall in love with homosexual men who have, moreover, the consonants d and v in their first names...
...As her name suggests, she has problems integrating flesh with spirit...
...for him, her words dissect experience only to kill it...
...She has great difficulty defining anything, and revels in giving opposite views between which she can't decide...
...Readers of the essays in Off Center will recognize Harrisonian motifs and at- titudes here...
...Foreign Bodies puts forward a wealth of interesting material, but it is, I think, a deeply unfinished novel...
...Foreign Bodies and the genre of obsessional literature do not an- swer such questions...
...While Foreign Bodies does not glut us with irony, Purges & principles ELECYIIICAL lll~.B Ronaid W. Schatz Univer~ty of Illinois, $22.95, 279 pp...
...The obsession is a given, corresponding in some coded way to an anthorial pres- ence, and chosen to disguise rather than to make clear --for audience and perhaps author herself...
...The object of her love is Devi, a handsome painter from India, and, like David Larrimar, a homosexual...
...She piles up mots in waves of self-congratulation, even as she tells us she is in pain...
...For a while, in the first flush of the New Deal and the wartime honeymoon with Russia, it did not matter...
...We are to share Ange- la's pain, but not get annoyed that she does nothing about it...
...I found this heterodox stuff interesting...
...In such fiction, the obsession, endlessly talked about, never explained, is all...
...Angela's confessor encourages her to speculate on her sexual journey rather than to end it, as she once wishes he would...
...There is no end to the affair: Angela has not been able to forgive Devi or herself for it, and the author has been unwilling to invent a fictional form to give the experience a satisfactory beginning,middle, and end...
...Angela responds by trying to imbue his flesh with theological value...
...Devi accentuates these, since his spiritual and moral attributes are mini- mal...
...A critic may someday write a study of novels of obsessional love...
...one of the constants would surely be the unworthi- ness as here, of the object of the obses- sion...
...Angela's mother dies, and, at the book's end, her father is near death...
...As he relates the rise and fall of the UE, Schatz gives an enlightening picture of the electrical industry and its giants, GE and Westinghouse...
...Angela also tells us about other sexual affairs she has during this time, in lieu of physical response from Devi...
...I unionists were Communists --the real article --Stalinists...
...Angela leaves Devi at the very end of the novel, resolving not to repeat her experience...
...Charles Owen Rice T RAGEDY is not too strong a word for what happened to the United Electri- cal, Radio and Machine Workers --CIO, (UE), that big beautiful union of 600,000 members...
...Does everything have to mean some- thing...
...The feminist theme is played in several chords, from the high seriousness and beauty of Lu- cy's coming of age to sympathy for, and at times satire of, Eileen, Angela's friend, who goes through multiple trans- formations in a short period...
...Such opin- ions, which Angela recognizes as idolatrous, together with many other animadversions along this iine~ advance a theory of salvation in a flesh that lacks or is counter to spirit...
...however, even if one could seriously entertain the theory, Angela's emotional preoccupa- tions prevent her frown a discursive treat- ment sufficient to encourage a good ar- gument...
...Devi accuses her of talk- ing and writing too much, of over-articulating lived experience...
...She has been divorced for eight years, is a ~uc- cessful writer, and lives in Brooklyn with her precocious daughter, Lucy, whose description resembles that of the author's own daughter in a 1980 collection of es- says, OffCenter...
...Their labor (Continued on page 444) Commonweal: 442...
...Too many of those fine trade Angela does have some witty remarks about the New York art world, on the fringes of which Devi lives...
...he asks her...
...It was shattered to bits because there was a fatal flaw in its leadership...
...The discrepancy between Devi's accusation and Angela's practice in- volves an irony of which one wishes a firmer affirmation by the author...
...A special blend of recollec- tion, sympathy, and irony makes the es- says very readable...
...May a reader psychoanalyze obsessed charaOets like Angela...
...Also, Ange- la's peculiar combination of freedom from convention and servitude to Devi may well involve sensitivity to a feminist motif that remains unavailable to the ob- tuse male reviewer...
...Foreign Bodies enunciates a curious theology of the flesh...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison either cannot or will not order Angela's life...
...An obsessional love dominates this time of her life, the main topic of the novel...
...But with the coming of the Cold War and McCar- thyism it mattered very much...
...Novels usually treat human experience more generously and give us a sense of order, of pattern if not of progress, of wisdom if not of joy...
...Oddly enough, a desire to define and make clear is the last fault of which the reader wishes to accuse Angela...
...Earlier, however, she has told us of an experience "years later" in which she relives Devi in another, finally learning how she had "hurt" him...
...Angela has philosophical and theolog- ical ambitions...
...Any of us might contemplate the frightening possibility that in a given five-year period of our lives we can't perceive progression...
Vol. 111 • August 1984 • No. 14
